Vehicle safety has improved dramatically over the years. Initially many of the improvements were due to advances in the materials selected for various automobile components. For example safety glass, which was first introduced for use in cars in the 1920's, helped to reduce serious injuries and/or fatalities to the driver, passengers and bystanders that often resulted from the windshield or other vehicle windows being shattered in a car crash. Similarly, adding padding to the passenger compartment, most notably to the surfaces of the dashboard, helped minimize head injuries during sudden vehicle stops, especially those due to a collision. Two of the most significant safety advancements made to date, seat belts and air bags, have been estimated to have saved over 300,000 lives in the past 40 years.
In recent years vehicle designs have become increasingly sophisticated, yielding vehicles that are capable of protecting the vehicle's occupants from serious injury during a collision. In order to verify a vehicle's crashworthiness, vehicle manufacturers as well as third party testers (e.g., Insurance Institute for Highway Safety or IIHS; National Highway Traffic Safety Administration or NHTSA) subject cars to various tests that are designed to replicate a range of crash conditions. These tests include front and side impact tests plus roof strength tests, the latter type of testing designed to determine the risks of occupant injury during a vehicle rollover.
Two different types of frontal crash tests have been used recently to determine a vehicle's crashworthiness. In the first type of test, referred to as a moderate overlap test or simply as a frontal offset test, the test vehicle is driven into a roughly two foot tall barrier at 40 mph, the barrier having a deformable face made of an aluminum honeycomb. The barrier is located just off of the vehicle's centerline. The second type of test, referred to as a small overlap frontal test, is designed to replicate the effects of the front corner of the vehicle hitting another vehicle or an inanimate object such as a utility pole or tree. In this test 25% of the total width of the vehicle strikes a rigid, five foot tall barrier with the car traveling at 40 mph. This has been proven to be a difficult test since the safety cage in a typical car is designed to withstand head-on collisions and moderate overlap frontal crashes, not crashes that primarily affect the outer edge of the car. This area of impact is particularly difficult to design for because the affected front wheel is often forced rearward into the footwell during the crash. Accordingly, what is needed is a vehicle control system that minimizes accident severity, for example wheel intrusion into the occupant compartment during a small overlap collision. The present invention provides such a control system.